Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2021

Over the past nine weeks we have remembered and celebrated the construction of the infrastructure, or scaffolding, of salvation. It started at the Easter Triduum with the death of Jesus, that was both a murder on the part of the authorities and an act of profound love by Jesus. That was followed by his resurrection from death at the hands of God, his Father, three days later. After six further weeks Jesus definitively moved on from physical life in this world and returned to his Father. This was capped off, ten days later, at Pentecost when he sent his Spirit, firstly to his close disciples and then, through them, to the whole wide world. We recalled that two weeks ago. Everything had been set up for the work of our salvation. Then, last week, as we celebrated the reality of God as Trinity, we paused to reflect how all three Persons in God shared, each in a different way, in that work of redemption. And now, with today’s Feast of Corpus Christi, we commemorate Jesus’ final supper with his disciples. There, he had symbolically anticipated his pending death and rising to life; and we tie it all together and make it present for ourselves in this sacrament of Eucharist.

A sometimes over-looked part of our eucharistic celebration is our sharing together of the cup of wine. We may tend to see it as little more than food plus drink, symbolising Christ’s flesh and blood. But Jesus intended it to tell us much more than that.

As we heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus referred to the cup which he directed them to drink from together, as containing now “the blood of the new covenant”. Many centuries beforehand, the prophet Jeremiah had looked forward to a “new covenant” destined to replace and immeasurably surpass the original covenant made by God with his People Israel as they journeyed from slavery in Egypt to take occupation of their Promised Land and to live there as a freed nation and a saved people.

Over time, that covenant had turned “pear-shaped” as the People lost their enthusiasm. But God remained constant in his love. Jeremiah spoke of God instituting a new covenant to replace the old. It would still be one where God would be their God and they would be God’s people. But, wonderfully, it would be infinitely more. Deep within them God would implant a law, writing it not on slabs of stone but on their hearts. They would all know God, the least no less than the greatest. God would forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.

As the first covenant was sealed by the blood of bulls killed by Moses on behalf of the People, the new covenant would be sealed by the blood of Jesus, shed by his murderers but freely offered in resolute love for all by Jesus himself.

Drinking from the one cup of the covenant, especially when celebrating the Feast of Passover, had become within the Hebrew culture the people’s accepted way of pledging together their commitment to God. Drinking together the freely shed blood of Jesus from the cup of the new covenant would be, in Jesus’ mind, his disciples’ pledge, made together, solemnly professing their heartfelt loyalty to the way of God, and committing themselves together to Jesus’ shared project of shaping the Kingdom of God on earth.

What a wonderful symbol of an even more wonderful reality. Yet so often our Church has been slow to encourage us to participate thoughtfully in this magnificent sacramental gesture. [And the necessary Covid precautions are not exactly helping at the moment.]